With this post I will start a series dedicated to broken design.
What's broken design? It's about things that we use that are fundamentally flawed. It's about stuff that seems obvious to some people but not to product designers.
I will start the series with a post about a game for the iPhone that I recently tried.
The game is called Fantasy War, produced by Gamevil, and can be found on the
Gamevil website and on
iTunes.
The purpose of the game is to become the leader of a fantasy realm. You can be human, orc or elf, and you progress through the game by completing some quests, battling the forces of evil in some dungeon, and waging war against other players.
As you accumulate experience and resources, you can improve the infrastructure (gold mine and lumber mill), learn new skills (cloth making, leatherworking, etc), upgrade your weapons, and hire stronger and more powerful armies.
The graphics resembles some 1990s arcade games, but it's still not bad for a mobile game. The rules are fairly quick to learn without explicit instructions and the level progression gradually unlocks more interesting content.
The developers make money selling "runestones", which allow you to do a lot more stuff and get really powerful armies.
Sounds ok, right? Well I actually like the game. It's very easy to play and the content is not bad at all. So where's the problem? What's the broken design?
Well, the problem is that this is not an iPhone game, or at least it's not meant to be. When you install the game, you actually install a simplified internet browser with little or no content. Every time you interact with the game, you actually navigate through a web page. All commands, all icons, all images, are just hyperlinks on a web page. Hang on, so where's the problem? I use internet all the time with my iPhone, and I have a lot of games on my iPhone that need an internet connection to work. No big deal.
No, indeed, it wouldn't be a big deal... if the game wasn't so connection greedy! There is no content on the iPhone. Everything needs to be downloaded from the internet, including all the images (and there are a LOT of images!).
In other words, this game assumes that it is running on a permanently connected device on broadband speeds... which is exactly the opposite of what an iPhone is. My user experience with this game goes something like this:
- start the game
- watch the rotating "loading..." icon for a few seconds
- watch a dark screen behind the "loading..." icon
- watch the text labels of the home screen appear behind the "loading..." icon
- watch the graphic background appear behind the "loading..." icon
- watch the images loading in chunks behind the "loading..." icon
- home screen fully loaded
- tap on any activity
- watch the rotating "loading..." icon for a few seconds
- repeat from point 3
In the end, I spend more time watching the rotating "loading..." icon that actually playing the game.
Add to this the fact that there is no fault tolerance built in this simple browser, and you also get to build familiarity with the "check your internet connection" error, after which you can only shut down the game and start it again.
Also add to this the fact that dungeons are time limited (you need to kill the boss within 'N' minutes, or you have to wait for an hour or more before you can try again) and you can see how you can quickly build up frustration.
The cherry on the cake is that if something goes wrong with the game you get some Korean error message popping up, which is ok if you can read and understand Korean (I can't do either).
The verdict:
broken design!
This is a basic architectural requirement for anything that is supposed to run on an iPhone: it must (please note, "must", not "should") be built for a seldom connected environment with less-than-broadband speeds. If that's not the case, then don't bother.
